But soon handsome Fuchsl was stolen, or perhaps he chased another rat back across the front. Hitler’s beloved mother was dead. Artillery had buried his friends at Ypres. Then the disappearance of the English dog broke his heart. What did he have left? Virtually nothing, except he could make himself feel better by hating the Jews. Of course, we don’t know the precise moment Hitler decided to become an antisemite, but antisemitism, as the 20th century existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, was an easy way for an antisemite to feel better about himself without having done anything on his own. And as the 19th century Polish-German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, it was a sign of envy of a weaker culture for a stronger one. The origins of antisemitism are much older, but likely have origins like thes.
Sayfa 39 - pdfKitabı okuyor
On The Hustle
I suppose
one of the worst times was
when
after a drunken reading and
an all-night party
I promised to appear at
No one ever talks about the punishing aesthetics of being poor.
Sayfa 93
Who has the power? Where is the center? (...) I'm confused about my right to offence, just as I'm confused about drinking as an act of resistance. There is something entitled about it. Yes, there is something rich.
Sayfa 31
Compared to New York, this is a real place where real things happen. Not microaggressions that are tweeted about, not theory; these are real adult aggressions, bodily, bloodying.
Sayfa 18
I went to one of the Big Three universities, where I majored in English literature for lack of interest in any other subject. I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one, and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desirables.
By accident I met some rich homosexuals, of the international queer set who cruise around the world, bumping into each other in queer joints from New York to Cairo. I saw a way of life, a vocabulary, references, a whole symbol system, as the sociologists say. But these people were jerks for the most part and, after an initial period of fascination, I cooled off on the setup.
Neolithic villages from the Middle East around 6000 bc typically seem to have contained 120 to 150 people, judging by the number of dwellings. And the estimated size of English villages recorded by William the Conqueror’s henchmen in the Domesday Book in 1086 also seems to have been about 150. Similarly, during the eighteenth century the average number of people in a village in every English county except Kent was around 160. (In Kent, it was a hundred... I wonder what that tells us about the folk there?)
In Palermo dialect the adjective ‘mafioso’ once meant ‘beautiful’, ‘bold’, ‘self-confident’. Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called ‘mafia’. ‘Cool’ is about the closest modern English equivalent.
The word mafioso began to have criminal connotations because of a hugely successful play written in Sicilian dialect, I mafiusi di la Vicaria (‘The mafiosi of Vicaria Prison’), which was first performed in 1863. The mafiusi are a gang of prison inmates whose habits look very familiar in retrospect. They have a boss and an initiation ritual, and there is much talk in the play of ‘respect’ and ‘humility’.
The greatest Old English poem is Beowulf, which belongs to the seventh century. It is a story of about 3,000 lines, and it is the first English epic. The name of its author is unknown.
